life/art/politics

Month: October 2015

There was a moment halfway through Noveller’s excellent set at the Glad Cafe in Glasgow where the spell was broken. I’d looked around the room and realised that the trippy backdrop Sarah Lipstate was playing against wasn’t being projected in the traditional sense.

It was the men, you see. They were standing there, staring at the girl with the guitar, beaming the light out of their eyes. And I was one of them.

My pal Jess was the first to raise it when the show was over. I’d brought her along as cover, I joked, transforming one women into a prop in the hope of escaping accusations of having done the same to another.

A mess of sounds dominated the living rooms and car journeys of my childhood. From my mother, there was Motown, Phil Spector, Stock Aitken Waterman, “production line pop” that I disdained at the time, unable or unwilling to see the glory of some of these manufactured dreams, and apparently disinterested in listening closely enough to discern the differences between one type of industry and another.

The gender distinctions are rather clichéd here, I know, but from my father there was a great billowing cloud of English folk rock that I took in with the nightly readings of Lord of the Rings and eventually grew to love – an alt modernity, tortured and poised and occasionally ridiculous, but with obvious cracks in it to attract an increasingly self-serious young man to fixate on, and enough gravity to keep him there.

Like I said in my last post, if I was in Labour I wouldn’t be feeling too hopeful about their chances of talking the Scottish electorate round any time soon, but even from my position outside of the party it’s hard not to feel a little bit soft and gooey any time I hear the Artist Taxi Driver get all worked up about Jeremy Corbyn:

I love the way that the Artist is driven to tell you that Corbyn’s bulletproof, he’s also weirdly protective of him – “the SNP turned up like a firm… Jeremy Corbyn, he’s there like on his own”. It reminds me of Ghostface Killah bigging up Sun God while also making him seem so small as to need his father’s shadow for protection: “This is my son… nigga came out my dick!”

Jeremy Corbyn didn’t come out The Artist Taxi Driver’s dick, but would that rant be any more boastful and tender if there was such a non-metaphorical relationship between them? Could his videos make Corbyn seem any more like an extension of the Taxi Driver’s routines than they already do? I doubt it.

I’m not built for optimism, so I spend more time at the bottom of this wave than at the top, but sometimes it’s good to see someone else riding out the highs, even if none of us can ever quite ignore the possibility of another dip back through the earth, down towards what lies underneath…

The campaign for Holyrood 2016 is looming in front of me right now, and the Tory apocalypse is making measured thought harder every day, so this post represents a hurried attempt to think about a couple of questions that might become important over the next few years before I get swamped by more pressing questions – a bit of a peak round the corner of Scottish politics, if you will.

Anyway, here are my questions…

Will the SNP commit to using Smith powers to make a public bid for Scotland’s rail franchises? New Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s line on this was was off-key, but while there were many stinging, X-Factor style critiques of his performance doing the rounds (this was my favourite, heavy as it is on technical detail) there was little indication that the SNP would have done things differently if they could have. Will any such promises be gained under continuing pressure from Corbyn’s Labour and the Scottish Greens

Is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party capable of finding an angle on Scotland that works? Related to the above. So far signs aren’t good, with Corbyn and his main man John McDonnell recycling the same lines that Scottish Labour have been failing to convince the electorate with for the past five years. Is there any chance of a radical commitment to devolution arising from the part’s current open policy debate? Is there a position they can take here that doesn’t look like surrender? It’s easy to talk about “winning back Scotland”, but the reality seems far more difficult for principled socialists and canny Kendalistas alike.

WillRISE run a left wing anti-EU campaign? The TTIP debate and the ongoing imposition of brutal austerity conditions on Greece has re-energised anti-EU sentiment on the left (and no I don’t just mean Owen Jones). With the SNP and the Scottish Greens certain to argue for EU membership, there’s space for someone to work up a left-of-centre, pro-Scottish independence pitch against the EU. I’ve no idea which side of this issue RISE will fall on, but some recent noises from the Scottish Left Project and discussions with some of their supporters suggest that they might find support for such a campaign.